RIM Objects to Survey Showing Weak BlackBerry Developer Outlook

Research in Motion Ltd. continues to get hammered in surveys of customer satisfaction and consumer interest, not to mention on the stock market. But at least one RIM executive isn’t taking a new study about developers losing interest in BlackBerrys lying down.

A new survey by Baird Equity Research of 200 application developers suggests that developers’ long-term outlook for BlackBerry 10 — RIM’s new operating system, currently still in the prototype stage — had fallen to 3.8 from 4.6 in the previous quarter, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most optimistic. And their outlook for RIM’s current line of BlackBerry 7 phones had fallen from 3.8 to 2.8 in the same period.

Alec Saunders, RIM’s vice president for developer relations, who has been evangelizing for RIM around the globe, took umbrage with the survey.

“I was pretty shocked by the findings,” Mr. Saunders wrote on RIM’s official developers’ blog. “I was shocked because the numbers in the report do not gel with what we’re seeing in the real world. The report contradicts much of what we are seeing and hearing in our developer community.”

Mr. Saunders cites RIM’s vendor base — those selling apps in RIM’s App World — as having grown 157% in the past year, and writes that the app catalog for RIM’s tablet, the PlayBook, “has grown by more than 15,000 apps since January 1 of this year.”

RIM’s current world tour for developers, BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour, spans 23 cities and “has seen over capacity registration in almost every city,” Mr. Saunders writes.

But those eager to develop apps for BlackBerry 10 will have to wait a while longer. RIM recently announced that its next line of phones, already delayed, now won’t be released until early next year. They had been expected by the end of this year.

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